Fictitious ads for San Antonio apartments preceded lawsuit against Facebook

The advertisement touting a San Antonio apartment for rent was submitted to Facebook in February and sounded like an attractive deal: “Beautiful remodeled unit! Available now! ... It will go fast. Located close to the park, near public transportation, close to shops, restaurants and lots of entertainment options. Call today!”

In reality, the apartment didn’t exist, nor did the property management company that supposedly wrote the ad. The notice had actually been submitted by the Fair Housing Council of Greater San Antonio to test if Facebook’s advertising platform allowed housing providers to exclude certain federally protected classes of prospective renters from ever seeing such ads.

A federal lawsuit filed earlier this week by the San Antonio nonprofit and other fair housing groups accuses the social media giant of letting landlords and real estate brokers hide housing advertisements from families with children, women and others in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

The San Antonio group joined the National Fair Housing Alliance in the lawsuit, along with the Fair Housing Justice Center based in New York City and HOPE — Housing Opportunities Project for Excellence, Inc. — based in Miami.

Their investigations found Facebook gives housing providers the option to exclude people of certain demographics — including those with interests based on disabilities, English as a second language or news delivered in Spanish — from ever seeing such ads, the lawsuit said. Facebook approves and permits publication of such ads “without consumers ever knowing they have been excluded,” the plaintiffs’ complaint alleged.

“Facebook has created this platform that’s basically giving landlords and other housing providers these tools to secretly discriminate against consumers without their knowledge,” said Sandra Tamez, executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Greater San Antonio.

Facebook disputed the allegations and said it doesn’t allow discrimination on its website.

“We believe this lawsuit is without merit, and we will defend ourselves vigorously,” the company said in a statement.

San Antonio’s fair housing council has seen a rise in complaints from consumers in the last three years claiming housing providers refused to rent to them or treated them differently because they had children, Tamez said, but none of those related to Facebook specifically.

The housing advocates created six advertisements touting fictitious apartments for rent in the San Antonio market to test if Facebook would publish them after certain federally protected classes of prospective tenants were filtered out to ensure they wouldn’t see the notices. Shortly after Facebook approved publication of those ads in February, the housing groups deleted all of them before they appeared online.

“We didn’t let them run ... because they weren’t real ads,” Tamez said.

One of those ads was created by the National Fair Housing Alliance, which used Facebook’s boost feature to exclude parents with children from seeing the notice. Advertisers may pay to use the boost feature so their ad shows up on potential customers’ Facebook pages or in their news feeds.

The national alliance then used the boost tool’s criteria options to exclude women from seeing that ad.

The other five ads were created by San Antonio’s fair housing council, which selected certain criteria using Facebook’s boost tool or Facebook Ad Manager to exclude different populations from seeing the notices, such as particular genders or mothers or parents with children, the lawsuit said.

Similar fictitious ads were submitted to Facebook for housing in other cities to test if the same practices would be allowed and were approved by the social media site for publication, according to the lawsuit.

A New York attorney representing the housing groups described Facebook’s practices as stealth-like.

“All of the groups that are being excluded by Facebook — women, families with young children, people with disabilities, potentially people who speak English as a second language — are all groups, I think, who often face big obstacles already to finding apartments,” Katherine Rosenfeld said. “For Facebook to be compounding that is very troubling, given their enormous reach.”

The Fair Housing Council of Greater San Antonio accepts an average of 440 complaints a year, Tamez said. Most of those come from Bexar County residents, but the group’s jurisdiction spans 37 counties across South Texas. The biggest share of complaints concerns disabled renters needing accommodations in their current housing environment.

Peggy O’Hare reports on housing, demographics and the census for the San Antonio Express-News’ Metro Desk. She joined the Express-News in April 2013. She is a former reporter at the Houston Chronicle, where she worked for 11 years. She is a graduate of Texas A&M University.